Posted 5 years ago on March 28, 2012, 1:42 p.m. EST by lobbypoo321
(1)
from Jersey City, NJ
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

http://rightcoastconservative.blogspot.com/2012/03/5-uncomfortable-truths-about-liberals.html
When one becomes a liberal, he or she pretends to advocate tolerance, equality and peace, but hilariously, they’re doing so for purely selfish reasons. It’s the human equivalent of a puppy dog’s face: an evolutionary tool designed to enhance survival, reproductive value and status. In short, liberalism is based on one central desire: to look cool in front of others in order to get love. Preaching tolerance makes you look cooler, than saying something like, “please lower my taxes” — Greg Gutfeld

Liberal is the wrong term-it was stolen by the socialist commie reactionary letists in the 60's to make them sound benign

25 Comments

When one becomes a conservative, he or she advocates intolerance, inequality and war, but hilariously, they’re doing so for purely selfish reasons. It’s the human equivalent of a puppy dog’s face: an evolutionary tool designed to enhance survival, reproductive value and status. In short, conservatism is based on one central desire: to look cool in front of others in order to get love. Preaching tolerance makes you look cooler, than saying something like, “please lower my taxes”

Ummm, you'll need more than your knee jerk anecdotal interpretations of human motivation to support such a far reaching statement. In other words, do you have a study that's been subjected to peer review, and is generally accepted among the majority of social scientists who work in this area? I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this question, a resounding NO.

This isn't something that you can just logically deduce, or where there's case studies in related areas that can be fairly applied to this question.

Well, that liberal strategy would only work if those things were widely popular to begin with. So, you're either saying most people are liberals or liberal values are widely popular. Either one works for me.

Liberals have been labelled "bleeding hearts" for a reason because they tend to advocate on behalf of those who have no voice and who are being oppressed by power. We have a difficult time ignoring the ills of the world. The World's biggest ill is Wall Street creating false scarcity in the markets and with land by owning everything in giant monopolistic conglomerates, price setting, hording, and downsizing. They drive up rates and manipulate markets purposely even if it causes everyone else to suffer while bribing off governments all around the world to get this accomplished. Occupy is a result of this. You can only screw the masses for so long until they begin to fight back.

Who stole what from whom? For as long as I can remember libertarianism was an extreme left wing variety of socialism, not far from anarchism until the Chicago School openly plotted to steal the term for the right.

Libertarianism was a left wing variety of socialism? Sorry, but not true...

"In a sense there have always and ever been only two political philosophies: liberty and power.

Either people should be free to live their lives as they see fit, as long as they respect the equal rights of others, or some people should be able to use force to make other people act in ways they wouldn’t choose.

It’s no surprise, of course, that the philosophy of power has always been more appealing to those in power. It has gone by many names—

Caesarism, Oriental despotism, theocracy, socialism, fascism, communism, monarchism, ujamaa, welfare-statism—and the arguments for each of these systems have been different enough to conceal the essential similarity.

The philosophy of liberty has also gone by different names, but its defenders have always had a common thread of respect for the individual, confidence in the ability of ordinary people to make wise decisions about their own lives, and hostility to those who would use violence to get what they want."

Just look up Libertarian Book Club. Far from being consevatiive of right wing by any defintion it is anarcho-syndicalist and a very, very old left wing British political tendency. That's just one example. There are actual discussions of the "theft" about, which was an open project of the Chicago school.

Back in the early 1960s when I first became a revolutionary socialist the most left wing tendency in the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) styled itself as the Libertarian Tendency.

Everything evolves. And what matters at the moment is how Libertarians see themselves.

"67 percent of libertarians [in a recent Pew survey] self-identify as independents, compared to 28 percent as Republicans and 5 percent as Democrats. "A growing number of Americans are choosing not to identify with either political party, and the center of the political spectrum is increasingly diverse," Pew concluded. "Rather than being moderate, many of these independents hold extremely strong ideological positions on issues such as the role of government, immigration, the environment and social issues. But they combine these views in ways that defy liberal or conservative orthodoxy."

The notion of evolution doesn't normally involve open theft. The right wing fuckers openly stole the term from the revolutionary socialist movement and we aim to steal it back! In most of the rest of the English speaking world libertarianism still has the left wing connotations of its origins, which is just another indication of how politically backward the United States is.

You keep saying that the right stole Libertarianism from the left. Yet, the Pew Study referenced above shows that modern libertarians do not consider themselves right or left. And I have spent the morning looking for something to support your statement (beside going to the Libertarian Book Club and downloading a bunch of books I'm not interested in reading).

Here's what I have found that disputes what you have written:

Classical liberalism is the philosophy committed to the ideal of limited government, constitutionalism, rule of law, due process, and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets.[1][2]

Notable individuals who have contributed to classical liberalism include Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. It drew on the economics of Adam Smith and on a belief in natural law, utilitarianism, and progress.

There was a revival of interest in classical liberalism in the 20th century led by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

Some call the late 19th century development of classical liberalism "neo-classical liberalism," which argued for government to be as small as possible in order to allow the exercise of individual freedom, while some refer to all liberalism before the 20th century as classical liberalism.

The term classical liberalism was applied in retrospect to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from the newer social liberalism.[

Libertarianism has been used in modern times as a substitute for the phrase "neo-classical liberalism", leading to some confusion. The identification of libertarianism with neo-classical liberalism primarily occurs in the United States where some conservatives and right-libertarians use the term classical liberalism to describe their belief in the primacy of economic freedom and minimal government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

John Stuart Mill, (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) who carried on the tradition of liberal (or libertarian) thought, wrote in his essay On Liberty about the struggle between authority and liberty. A crucial point he makes which may put libertarian beliefs into question is his idea of "the tyranny of the majority." If the social contract theory remains in tact, and it is the peoples' job to create the contract while it is the government's job to enforce it, what is to be said if the prevailing opinion is one which an individual feels is immoral or simply does not agree with? Mill, then, is forced to develop a list of the very basic liberties an individual has. Let us see if any of them sound familiar.

The freedom to think as one wishes, and to feel as one does. This includes the freedom to opinion, and includes the freedom to publish opinions known as the freedom of speech.

The freedom to pursue tastes and pursuits, even if they are deemed "immoral," as long as they do not cause harm.

The "freedom to unite" or meet with others, often known as the freedom of assembly.

These were the basic human rights, and to explain how the only way these liberties could be questioned, he is quoted as saying, "That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

Historically there is a vast difference between liberalism and libertarianism. Just as there is a vast difference between liberalism and progressivism. Liberalism is essentially a dead centerist doctrine. It has been displaced in the United States by the statist progressive doctrine. In Europe there is really no equivalent, the closest thing being labor based social democratic politics.

It was very specifically Milton Friedman and the Randian school that set about to steal the term libertarianism, though they did this quite openly.

Clearly their efforts never worked in Europe. Look for example at the home page of this very web site today. They are talking about the mass mobilizations in Europe and the role that "libertarian labor" is playing in that mobilizatin and they are not talking about right wing or conservative labor groups. Indeed they are talking about quite the opposite, the most radical, revolutionary, left wing, democratic and anti-parliamentary elements in the labor movement.

I'm generally not interested in talking to reactionary troglodytes but this is an interesting discussion.

But, I think that one could actually say that Friedman was an economist first with a libertarian philosophy. Are you saying that one must be in lock step agreement on all issues to even begin to say that they have a libertarian philosophy; or that freedom of opinion, thought and speech do not have room for the blending of philosophy?

Personally, I do not relate entirely to one school of thought over another - I can find things that I agree with in all .... However, in order to vote, I must ultimately choose who has the platform more closely alligned with my beliefs.

And I'll ignore the insult because I too find this an interesting discussion in that I have done a lot of research this morning and learned a great deal about the history of political schools of thought ........which, I don't think I would have done if the insult were on target now would I?

He's the guy who came up with the idea of stealing the word libertarianism from the left. Clearly this worked in the United States largely because, I think, at the time, there were probably fewer than 1000 libertarian socialists in the US. By contrast, in Europe libertarian socialism is a fairly strong minority current in the socialism movement, very closely related to anarcho-syndicalism which is experiencing something of a resurgence because of the Occupy movement and the European debt crisis.

E mails are maddening to me. I've constantly complained that even people who strongly disagree with each other are much nicer to each other at encampments than they are on line, but the medium is so fucked up that even I decend into that reprehensible behavior.

Yes, one must be on constant guard to not descend into insulting one another...if the goal is to learn about each other and to find common ground to make change, courteous debate is important....something that a lot of the posters here could try to work towards.

And unfortunately, term borrowing ( to use a less harsh word than theft : ) is an ongoing issue - and all political sides do it....; the challenge is to do your own reading and seek to find out the original meaning of those terms. As I tell my children all the time, words do mean something.

The home page of this web site makes it very clear that OWS is a nonpartisan movement, which is a lot more clear at Occupation encampments than it is on this forum.

It was also clear in the first month or so of the movement. The movement then was no less radical than it is now, but it was much more focussed on economic issues and to a considerable degree transcended "wedge issues" like gun control and abortion. Friedman really did want to steal the term libertarianism from the left. Theft was HIS term. Liberalism was never a left doctrine. In the spectrum of politics it was always centerist--a middle class doctrine. It was abandoned as an ideology more than 100 years ago by the pre-corporate middle class as they thrashed about for allies and found their most reliable ally in the form of the state itself. Progressivism is really a much more accurate term. Essentially from about 1910 to the Reagan revolution it was the dominant political ideology in the US, really the dominant ideology of both major political parties and during its period of dominance NOBODY would have characterized it as a leftist doctrine.